Hard drive hammered - computer becomes worse than sluggish

Hi all,

Got a weird one. At least, weird because I can't pin down the cause. At random intervals, probably no more often than once a day, maybe less, the hard drive starts getting hammered to the point that the light never goes out (hardly even flickers) and the computer becomes very unresponsive. This keeps up for about 10 minutes and then stops.

Compaq Presario M2000 series (M2045AP)
Celeron 1.3Ghz
Windows XP SP3
512mb RAM
Avira Personal

It's not defragging, running a virus scan, updating security software, running Windows updates, running the Indexing Service. I also don't think there's any malware on here. The virus scan was run earlier today and the update occurred an hour before tonight's episode. Windows updates are set to notify but not download. Indexing Service is turned off. (I hope! Anywhere but Search that I need to deal with it?) No other security software on here does automatic updates. Firefox wasn't updating.

Using Task Manager and looking at CPU and memory, nothing much is happening. Add I/O columns and we start to see some action. Having only seen this happen three times when I was sure nothing should be happening, and not having had the Task Manager open the first time (so unresponsive I couldn't open it but you can pop it up from the System Tray), I'm guessing which processes are likely to be involved each time - probably these:
lsass.exe
wuauclt.exe
wmiprvse.exe
csrss.exe
avguard.exe - active protection??
avgnt.exe - again, active protection??
explorer.exe
svchost.exe - only 1 of them
taskmgr.exe
ramaint.exe
avwsc.exe
That list is in I/O Reads order, heaviest use first.

This second time when I was able to view Task Manager, I noticed Logmein.exe had changing numbers too. Don't think this was the case the first time.

Anyone got any bright ideas on what it could be? The owner of this computer would be very confused if this occurred to them and worried about malware.

 

Greetings, chookers...

How about Event Viewer? You might try checking the event logs at or near the start of the hammering...

Also, have you noticed the same symptoms in Safe Mode?

 

Run What's my computer doing and watch.
http://www.itsth.com/en/download/index.php 2nd from the bottom.

 

That is a nice little program - thx, plodr...

 

Hi all,

You have wuauclt.exe as 2nd in your list of high IO, this is usually run from the Windows System32 folder and, if so, most likely safe and is part of Windows Update. If the file's in a different location, you may have a Malware infection.

However, there does appear to be a recent problem with this process bogging down XP and Vista PC's.

It looks like MS may be issuing some kind of work around for this soon: "We have gotten reports from multiple sources and consider this to be a live service issue and we are investigating it as a Priority 1.".